METM14 presentation

Practical ideas for getting the most out of your working environment: part V

 
The idea of this presentation is to provide a forum where attendees can share tools and tips that help them work more efficiently. The presenters will launch the session with four topics of interest and then open the discussion to all attendees. We look forward to hearing what tools you’ve embraced this year. Please come armed with ideas!  
 
Speech recognition (Andrew Steel)
This section will examine speech recognition’s chief advantages over keyboard input and explore the changes in mental processes and working practices that translators may need to make to use speech recognition effectively.
 
Windows 8: beyond the tiles (Emma Goldsmith)
This short presentation will discuss the pros and cons of Win8, explain how to emulate Windows 7 and look at what’s in the pipeline.
 
Google Ngram Viewer (Mary Fons i Fleming)
Google Books as a quick-and-dirty corpus to resolve questions about usage over time. Will this phrase turn out to be anachronistic in my context? Is it only used on the “wrong” side of the Atlantic? Is it getting dated?
 
Google custom search (Alan Lounds)
Google custom search is a quick and easy way to create a high-quality corpus of websites that can be queried using a Google search engine. You can choose only the sites you trust in the field you are working in and you can share your search engine with your colleagues.
 
 
Andrew Steel, DipTransIoLET, MCIL, MITI is co-founder and managing partner of a quality-certified (ISO 9001 and EN 15038) specialised translation practice serving corporate and institutional clients. He has been translating full time from Spanish to English since 1998 and he has been using speech recognition software since 2003. He is also co-author of CalPro.
 
Emma Goldsmith is a freelance Spanish to English medical translator. She originally trained as a registered general nurse in London and later retrained as a translator in Madrid.
Emma enjoys networking with colleagues on Twitter and she writes a blog called “Signs & Symptoms of Translation” about medical translation and SDL Trados Studio.
 
Mary Fons is a conference interpreter and translator with over 25 years of wide-ranging experience, particularly in biomedical topics. As a native trilingual (English, Catalan and Spanish) who also works from French and Italian, she is forced to devote much time and effort to keeping her languages separate and up to date.
 
Alan Lounds is head of the Language Advisory Unit at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, where he manages the translation of institutional and academic documents and the creation of language support resources. He has 25 years’ experience as a freelance editor and translator and also teaches academic writing. He is a founder member and the current chair of Mediterranean Editors and Translators.